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If you spend a few weeks following a donation all the way through the food bank process, as I did researching a story that ran yesterday, you’re likely to be inspired (by the efforts of volunteers) and saddened (by the need the food bank serves).

At some point you’re also likely to say to yourself, “this is absurd.” Because it becomes clear that through the food bank system, we’ve marshalled millions of dollars in philanthropy and millions more hours in volunteer labour to create a food distribution system that duplicates much of the work grocery stores have already done.

Here’s what I mean: if my neighbour can’t afford a can of soup, I could just give him 99 cents to buy one from the store at the end of our street.

Or I could go to that store myself, buy a can of soup and then take it to a donation drop-off point, where a truck will pick it up and take it to a warehouse in Etobicoke, where it will be sorted and stored until it is packed back into a truck and sent to a local food-bank location, where it will be unpacked and sorted and shelved and then later put into a basket that my neighbour can pick up at some point and bring home.

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That second option is what we collectively do through the food bank system, even though it seems needlessly elaborate. My neighbour doesn’t have trouble finding food — such as we would face in a famine, in which case people sending food to our neighbourhood from other places that have lots of food would make sense. My neighbour has trouble affording food that is easily available quite near to our house. But we don’t address his shortage of money, the actual root of the problem. Instead we marshal a lot of resources addressing a non-existent food shortage. There are a lot of reasons for that, but looking at it from one vantage point, it appears that in the process we waste a lot of valuable time and energy.

Though another thing you notice talking to everyone along the way throughout the Daily Bread food-bank system is that the time and energy is not exactly wasted. The food bank employs people, some of whom find their way to it through programs that give skills and guidance to those on social services. It provides training to people in its meal-program kitchens. It serves as a useful and fulfilling service community to many regular volunteers who are retired or lonely or seeking purpose and companionship. It provides a place for school and corporate groups on good-works outings to spend time thinking about poverty and hunger. The food programs served by the system often act as an entry where homeless or socially isolated people get connected to other supportive agencies.

Talking to volunteers and employees throughout the Daily Bread system, I heard again and again how good the work they do for the food bank makes them feel, how it scratches an itch to “give back.” For donors who undertake the relatively low-investment act of bringing a can of food to put into a collection box at work or school or the local arena, I expect the same motivation is involved — certainly it has been for me.

It may be needlessly elaborate, in other words, but its very size and scope have led it to build a valuable community around addressing poverty and hunger. The people operating it seem very aware of how strange it is to manage the logistics of a food-redistribution operation when the problem it actually addresses is money distribution. Daily Bread does a lot of advocacy work to address poverty and to advocate for more efficient solutions through government, and its recent reports note carefully that key things like the unaffordability of housing and the inadequacy of welfare rates are what drive people to visit food banks.

We have yet to find a way to make giving people who are in poverty more affordable housing, or more money, as satisfying a rallying point as providing food to them seems to be. There’s a certainty to what you are giving someone that comes with a specific food donation. There’s a tangible connection between the universally understood feeling of hunger and the solution to it provided by food, a connection that somehow frees it from the psychological and moral complications we attach to otherwise giving things to people in need.

In the absence of bigger, possibly more elegant and efficient, solutions to poverty — better jobs, better social supports, more money — the food bank system does good work. It provides real help to tens of thousands of people each year, making their lives easier, allowing them not just to eat but to more easily afford rent and clothes and books for their children. Meanwhile, it creates goodwill and community among the 10,000 volunteers who participate. It helps the many thousands more who donate to think and feel something — gratitude, maybe, self-congratulation, connection, even anxiety — when they pick up a can and put it in a box.

It’s an absurd system, and a beautiful one, too. That it the best system we have right now is a reminder both of what good we can do together, and how much better we could do.

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